Social Media addiction !!! Are you Addicted !! !!

Do you remember your Klout score !! Do you share your Location via Foursquare (every time you move around) !! Do you Tweet about your Breakfast, Lunch, Coffee Break, Dinner !!! Do you manage to update your Facebook Status for every other small or big News!! Are you too Busy tweeting about the awesome time that you are having instead of living in the moment and avoiding eye contact with the person you are with ?? Do you keep surfing about what’s New in Social Media in market and how to master it!! Well if you do these things be careful, you might be termed as Social Media Addict!!!

So, Do you think you are a Social Media Addict!!! Are we all getting too dependent on Social Media that we have actually almost stopped interacting or meeting human beings for real! For some of us, including me it was really difficult to disagree to the above point, but it’s a fact. Social networks have changed the ways we interact with each other enormously. We most often end up spending more time sharing at our computer screens that actually getting up and having a short chat with our colleagues, friends, professionals etc. The concept of meeting people has changed completely over the period of time.

The dependency on virtual interaction than personal one has really gone high. It’s hard to believe that kids do end up discussing their project work via Social media. Just one post on Facebook and your get an instant reply. Are we saying that this is not a good practice… Well, no one is against the use of Social Media but one had to draw a line and have discipline while using such forum.

Few checks from our daily life to tell us whether we are social media addicts:

– Once we are up, the first thing that we tend to do is Check BBM Messenger / Whats Up / Mails / Facebook Messages / Tweets and so on.

– Some of us wake up in middle of night to see if we have mentions in Twitter

– Updating every small and big event across these forums, Status messages like “Time for Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner, dating, outing and at times even crib about bad day!” is a must mention.

– You Check In via Foursquare or Places and announce your arrival/departure from various places be if office, school, home, any famous/Non famous restaurants and so on..

– Responding to all the comments, mentions on FB or Twitter within seconds, thanks to Blackberry and Android phones.

– Share random pictures, comment and like the moment pictures are clicked or shared within network!

– Search for new updates in this platform and master it in short while, like finding new tools for twitter stats , for FB and LinkedIn stats. Example being KLOUT.

– Most important, Feeling incomplete when we are out and not able to use this as if someone thing important is missing. – And then the same process will carry on till the wee hours 🙂

So in all this activities it’s really hard to find out the time you spent in interacting with real people (Outside your virtual world). As per my personal experience, Social interaction is good, it’s a platform where I have really enjoyed sharing news, blogs and personal opinion which ofcourse I might have not done when I met someone in real. I like to utilize social media to engage in social interactions, it’s just an alternative. Again the reason to write this post is not to say that using Social Media is bad, but the key is to be able to balance the use of this exciting form of interaction with all the other aspects of our lives.

When I was a small kid, 8 out of 10 families used to watch TV every night. You could walk down a street and observe them sitting in front of their TV sets. They would spend the entire evening like that.

The advent of television destroyed much of the communal life that existed before that, like cooking classes for women and stamp collecting clubs. How social was that?

So that’s why I’m thrilled that we now have social media. I prefer virtual meetings to no meetings at all 😉